This morning on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Chairman Ed Royce discussed Syria and the recent chemical attack, the need to hold Russia accountable for its aggression and the importance of fixing the deeply flawed Iran nuclear agreement. Video and a few key excerpts are below.

We must deter the use of chemical weapons:

“[Y]ou do not allow an attack on civilians, especially when you have U.S. troops in uniform still carrying out the fight against ISIS in this theater… Since the First World War we’ve had broad agreement here that there will not be use of chemical weapons.”

Part of the U.S. response should include sanctions against Assad and his enablers:

[W]e have my legislation over in the Senate, passed unanimously through the House in order to put additional pressure and sanctions on those who have enabled Assad to commit atrocities – that would be Iran and Russia. We need to get that bill out of the Senate and on to the president’s desk.”

Putin’s continued aggression cannot go unanswered:

“Putin’s aggression has been amped up. His attempts to involve himself in elections across all of Europe…[and] here as well, is still increasing rather than decreasing. The aid and comfort he is giving Assad, including with the use of chemical weapons, is an additional concern. You take the totality of that and it is clear that we need to ramp up sanctions. And the sanctions that we just ramped up, that the president just deployed, actually dropped the value of the ruble by four percent, and the stock market in Russia by eight percent. This is in order to put real pressure on the oligarchs around Putin in order to try to get a change in conduct.”

European allies “need to get on board” with our effort to fix serious flaws in the Iran nuclear agreement:

“The Europeans need to get on board on the three changes that we are pushing… Extend that sunset out at the end of the agreement. The other has to do with the ballistic missiles that they’re developing. We have to have compliance. We can’t have a mass production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. And lastly, we’ve got to be able to actually verify, on the bases where they’ve been doing their research. We have to have verification on this agreement.”

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